How Art Conservators Restore Old Paintings & Revive Their Original Colors

We tend to imag­ine old paint­ings as hav­ing a mut­ed, yel­low-brown cast, and not with­out rea­son. Many of the exam­ples we’ve seen in life real­ly do look that way, though usu­al­ly not because the artist intend­ed it. As Julian Baum­gart­ner of Chicago’s Baum­gart­ner Fine Art Restora­tion explains in the video above, these paint­ings’ col­ors have changed over the decades, or in any case appeared to change, because of the lay­er of resin on top of them. When that kind of coat­ing is first applied, it actu­al­ly makes the hues under­neath look rich­er. As time pass­es, alas, chem­i­cal changes and the accu­mu­la­tion of dirt and grime can result in a dull, even sick­ly appear­ance.

“A lot of peo­ple say that the var­nish should nev­er be removed, “that that’s a pati­na that is on the sur­face of the paint­ing and that it adds to the paint­ing’s qual­i­ty: it makes the paint­ing look bet­ter, it makes it look more seri­ous,” says Baum­gart­ner.

“Those are all inter­est­ing opin­ions, but they’re all inac­cu­rate. If the artist want­ed to apply a pati­na to their paint­ing, they could apply a pati­na and tone down the col­ors. But most artists, when they apply a var­nish, do not envi­sion that that var­nish will ever become yel­low or brown, or will crack or become cloudy.” The idea is to get the col­ors back to how the artist would have seen them when the work first attained its fin­ished state.

There­in lies the dif­fer­ence between a paint­ing and, say, a cast-iron skil­let. But on some lev­el, the actu­al labor of clean­ing a work of art — as Baum­gart­ner demon­strates, sped-up, in the video — dif­fers less than one might imag­ine from that of clean­ing a kitchen imple­ment. The result, how­ev­er, can cer­tain­ly be more strik­ing, espe­cial­ly with a can­vas like this one, whose twin-sis­ter sub­jects pro­vide an ide­al means of show­ing the con­trast between col­ors long cov­ered by var­nish and those same col­ors new­ly exhumed. Though there now exist for­mu­las that don’t turn yel­low in quite the same way, more than a few artists stick to the clas­sic damar var­nish, which does have advan­tages of its own — not least keep­ing a few more gen­er­a­tions of con­ser­va­tors in busi­ness.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How an Art Con­ser­va­tor Com­plete­ly Restores a Dam­aged Paint­ing: A Short, Med­i­ta­tive Doc­u­men­tary

A Deter­mined Art Con­ser­va­tor Restores a Paint­ing of the Doomed Par­ty Girl Isabel­la de’ Medici: See the Before and After

Watch an Art Con­ser­va­tor Bring Clas­sic Paint­ings Back to Life in Intrigu­ing­ly Nar­rat­ed Videos

The Art of Restor­ing a 400-Year-Old Paint­ing: A Five-Minute Primer

Watch the Tate Mod­ern Restore Mark Rothko’s Van­dal­ized Paint­ing, Black on Maroon: 18 Months of Work Con­densed Into 17 Min­utes

The Joy of Watch­ing Old, Dam­aged Things Get Restored: Why the World is Cap­ti­vat­ed by Restora­tion Videos

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.